Philip Kinghas a gift for celebrating what's about to happen – and capturing what's about to disappear. In the midst of our current identity crisis, trust is what we need to recapture, he tells GRÁINNE FALLER
PHILIP KING HAS the air of a man who is never bored. It’s the quiet but profound enthusiasm of a man who values his own luck. In recent weeks he has been travelling all over the country – talking to people, visiting communities, listening to people playing music, playing a bit himself – all in aid of a documentary series called Cerbh é? (a Sibéal Teo production for TG4). “You couldn’t call this a job,” he says quickly. “I suppose it’s what I do. It’s an enormous privilege, really.”
King lights up as he describes the current project. “We’ve gone in search of these six musicians who were central in the transmission of the tradition,” he explains. “I’ve asked six people who were influenced by these individuals to go in search of them. Their names are known to this generation, but not much is known about the men behind the music. We’ve always seen our role as celebrating what’s about to happen and capturing what’s about to disappear.”
This week, he and accordion player Tony McMahon are following the trail of a musician called Joe Cooley. “Here was a man who died aged 49 in 1973. He had emigrated to America and was a block layer, but he was probably, and still is, one of the most legendary accordion players in traditional music,” says King. “I met his brother in Edenderry today. He’s 92 and I think there were 11 children in the room with him. It was a stimulating place to go and meet a group of people where the tradition and the music are absolutely alive.”
After all of his years exploring music and people’s stories, King still seems exhilarated by the experience. “Over the last while, I’ve been in small houses, in little bars and in places all over the country, with people who carry this amazing thing, this remarkable, rich and powerful gift,” he says. “These communities open their doors and welcome you into this world of Irishness. They are, like everybody else, all affected by the recession, and times are difficult, but they have the music – this very real thing to sustain them. It’s truly remarkable.”
King has made a career out of musical journeys – at one time paving the way with his hugely influential band Scullion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, other times following a trail such as that of the landmark television series Bringing it All Back Home, in which he traced the remarkable path of Irish music as it travelled abroad with the emigrants, collided with technology, and was beamed back home again.
“I had no idea what I would find,” says King of that time, almost 20 years ago. “But to take a bunch of musicians from Ireland and put them into a room with the likes of Emmylou Harris, the Everly Brothers and Ricky Skaggs was absolutely fantastic. They had never met before but the language – the lingua franca of the day – was, of course, the music.”
Music has always been like that for King – a means of breaking down barriers and establishing trust.
“I was a teacher for a very short time in the vocational school in Dundrum,” he recalls. “I went to see Rory Gallagher play in the Carlton one Saturday night. I knew Rory – we were both from Cork – and we went for a pint after the gig.” On Monday morning, word had spread through the school. “I walked into the classroom and everyone was wearing denim jackets,” King continues. “Down the back of the room, this guy stood up and said: ‘Was tha’ you wi’ Rory Gallagher there on Saturday nigh’, was it?’ I said: ‘It was. Yes it was.’ They couldn’t believe it, this could not be. Eventually one thing led to another and we chatted away about him. But the interesting thing was that the next time we talked about the American Civil War, we spoke about the blues player Muddy Waters and the Mississippi, and how that song Rory plays is one of Muddy’s tunes. Those kids – their language was a musical language. It unblocked everything. The barrier had dissolved and a trust was established.”
He didn’t teach for long – just two years or so – but the fascination with history is another feature of his work over the years. Over the summer, he and his co-directors at South Wind Blows, Nuala O’Connor and Tina Moran, will be producing a three-part documentary series for RTÉ television. Authored and presented by Diarmaid Ferriter, incoming professor of modern Irish history at UCD, the series documents the development of the Irish State from the harsh austerity of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to a fully evolved democracy.
There will be a strong emphasis on history as it was experienced on the ground, on the social changes and improvements brought about by voluntary organisations and popular movements such as the ICA, credit unions and others. Very much “bottom-up” history, the series will examine the way in which power was exercised and distributed, challenged and resisted. It looks at how the outcomes of these tensions and conflicts shaped the institutions of the Irish State and impacted on the lives of ordinary people.
“The next decade in Ireland is going to be a complex and difficult time,” he says, and the arrival of 2016 will mark a time for reassessment, 100 years after independence.
He is in a contemplative mood this evening, preoccupied by the constant talk of recession and downturn. Although the focus now is on the failing economy and diminishing material wealth, King is sure that our problems run much deeper. “You can smell the fear,” he says. “The trauma of what’s gone on – it’s like the end of a torrid affair. It was clandestine and exciting but now it’s over.”
He says we need to find some way to disarm the fear: “Singing worked for Bernice Johnson Reagon, the civil rights activist and singer with Sweet Honey in the Rock. She once told me that when they raised their voices to sing before a Martin Luther King rally, the singing ‘rolled back the fear’.”
He believes that we’re in the middle of a collective identity crisis, so battered is our confidence. It is as though our sense of self became so caught up in the success and the wealth that it fractured as the economy deflated and threw us off-kilter. “We believed what people told us,” he says. “Were we naive? Was the media machine so sophisticated? Was the branding operation so marvellous? Was the lifestyle so alluring that we had to have it? We thought all of it was real but as it turns out it was not.”
He believes that we have to get back to the things that gave us self-belief and confidence in the first place before it all got caught up in the maelstrom of the economy. King insists that there is something special about Ireland. “We have something within us,” he says. “It’s ours and it’s different. Cultural tourism is fast becoming the most important element we have to offer our visitors. But we must take care. It’s a valuable resource and we must be careful not to opencast-mine it.”
He sees it in his own home place eight miles west of Dingle at the foot of a mountain called Mount Eagle. He presents his radio show, South Wind Blows – that gorgeous mix of music and musings – from there every Saturday evening. “There’s something here,” he says. “The language is spoken, the music is real, the sea is clean, the food is fresh, the people are warm. There’s a pull to the place and people feel it. You know when a place weaves its magic spell on you and you can’t go away. You lose part of your heart to it and you always go back.”
Another of his projects, the long-running RTÉ series Other Voices, owes a lot to that magnetic pull. “You can’t really afford to bring the musicians to Dingle and you can’t really afford to pay them,” says King, “but they come for the experience. They come for a different kind of sustenance. Damien Rice, Glen Hansard, Lisa Hannigan, Amy Winehouse, Bell X1, Ray Davies and Elbow . . . Droves of musicians have come to this little room, the Church of St James, that holds 70-odd people. They have come from the biggest festivals and the biggest stages of the world to the edge of Europe. We capture these unique performances and share them with the world.
“Growing up in the 1960s, I listened to The Beatles and the Stones, and there was this very strange music from the west coast of America, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, all of that. All of the stuff that was cool because it wasn’t from Ireland,” he recalls.
But then, at a Donovan concert in Cork city when he was about 16, something changed for him. “The support act was Planxty – Christy Moore, Dónal Lunny, Andy Irvine and Liam O’Flynn, who played the uilleann pipes,” he says. “Three tunes into this gig, people in the concert had their hands up in the air saying: ‘That’s mine.’ Something in the music spoke eloquently to us and we could say: ‘That’s ours and it’s cool.’
“I walked through Trinity on the way here,” he continues. “ The whole place is absolutely beautiful in the sunlight. It’s glorious. I looked up at the junior common room and I remember 1972, 1973 and 1974, seeing Geordie Hanna, Paul Brady, Phil Lynott – all those people walking around playing music in there. That’s all still here. All of those things still go on.”
But does it have the same impact nowadays? King stops short of saying that cultural life was devalued during the Celtic Tiger. “I think that it has maybe been taken for granted,” he says. “The definition of success in Ireland became very material. You became defined by what you had, not by what you did. There was an unreal quality about the past 10 years. We have to get a grip on what we have that’s real. The music is real, the language is real, the accent is real, the character is real. We have lost a lot but we can’t lose the things that are a part of us – the things that are given. The wealth, the emphasis on the economy was never a natural part of us but we came to believe that it was.”
“Can we believe in ourselves, can we trust ourselves, can we reinvent ourselves? Is there some sort of doubt there?” he asks. “The country is less than 100 years old. Some argue that we have an emotional age of 17 or 18 years old, and that we haven’t fully come of age yet, in terms of being comfortable with our identity.”
He is not, for a second, wishing a return to the bad old days. “I think the world is a better place now, for all sorts of social reasons,” he says. “The church has changed and will never again have that power and authority. This is good. But when you are prepared to lose things of such huge symbolic significance like Tara, for example, it’s clear that something within us has become unbalanced. We need to regain some ballast.”
The confidence to draw from the past, from the things that, King believes, are a part of us – such as our music, our language, our writing – will play an important part in regaining that sense of self.
“I remember seeing a very young Rory Gallagher with this remarkable energy and power – this Irishness that he had. He was a white man but he played the blues with an abandon that had a bawling, loud, in-your-face sort of quality that was entirely unrestrained. I hear that same quality in a sean-nós singer like Joe Heaney. I’d hear it when Luke Kelly would stand up and sing Hot Asphalt. Bono will cite hearing Luke Kelly as being a huge thing – this big, loud, blazing quality that Bono has at his best. There’s a magic in it.”
It all comes down to imagination. Ireland has produced musical virtuosos and some of the best writers ever to put pen to paper. We may not have oil or other resources; we have imagination to burn and imagination is the key to future success, not just in Ireland but internationally. “We’re a young country,” King says. “I think that just around now is the time when we need to start reimagining ourselves as we grow up. 1916 was a revolution dreamed up by poets and dreamers. Maybe we need to look to that rich seam of imagination we have.”
He is still talking about our crisis of soul, rather than our battered economy, but whether we acknowledge it or not, the two are interlinked and cannot be separated.
Inaction is not an option. “We can’t go around wringing our hands and saying ‘Jesus, this is awful’. We’re going to have to do something about it. We have an obligation and a right to imagine a better society for ourselves. If we can imagine it, it can happen.But the key to all that is to begin the difficult process of re-establishing trust in ourselves, with each other and in institutions. If we look to ourselves, we’ll be fine. If we take the long view, we’ll be fine.”